JENNIFER LAWRENCE made her mark on the comic book world when she took on the role of Mystique in the X-Men First Class series. However, she was not a fan of the franchise by the time it came to an end – and with good reason.
Jennifer Lawrence is taking to the small screen tonight in Red Sparrow on Channel 4 at 10pm. The 2018 movie put her in a Black Widow-esque role that made a young woman a master assassin in plain sight.
However, just a few years earlier she wrapped up her part of the X-Men series in X-Men: Dark Phoenix.
And ending her run in the series became a relief for the American actress.
Lawrence hit the big screen as Mystique / Raven Darkholme for the first time in 2011’s X-Men: First Class.
She reprised her role in the series twice more in X-Men: Days of Future Past and X-Men: Dark Phoenix.
But she openly admitted how hard it was playing the hero.
She was first reluctant to rejoin the series for a third movie but agreed on the condition that director Simon Kinberg was involved. When he signed up, she kept to her word.
Lawrence later admitted that Kinberg’s presence in the movie helped her play Mystique better.
“I suddenly felt more connected to my character than I ever have been before,” she said.
However, it still didn’t stop her biggest complaint about playing Rave: The make-up.
Raven’s real form is perfected on screen by buckets of blue body paint and dozens of prosthetic details.
Eventually, it got too much for her.
Lawrence once commented: “I love these movies — it’s just the paint,” referencing her costume.
The costume, which took over eight hours to get painted on her body, also made it difficult for her to do essential things – such as going to the bathroom.
She told Graham Norton: “The guys who made it were like: ‘Well, she’s a girl. She doesn’t go to the bathroom!'”
She went on: “So, I pee standing up out of a funnel.”
The star later noted how the paint fumes could have been affecting her.
Lawrence admitted that, while filming First Class, she “didn’t care about fumes and toxins” in the paint.
“Now I’m almost 25,” she later said. “And I’m like: ‘I can’t even pronounce this and that’s going in my nose? I’m breathing that?'”
Just last year, she referenced her X-Men movies as the reason behind her exit from the public eye.
The 32-year-old was interviewed after spending a few years in obscurity alongside her new husband, Cooke Maroney.
Lawrence confessed that her work in the past decade has not been up to her standard.
She said: “I was not pumping out the quality that I should have. I just think everybody had gotten sick of me. I’d gotten sick of me. It had just gotten to a point where I couldn’t do anything right.”
She added: “I think that I was people-pleasing for the majority of my life. Working made me feel like nobody could be mad at me: ‘Okay, I said yes, we’re doing it. Nobody’s mad.’ And then I felt like I reached a point where people were not pleased just by my existence. So that kind of shook me out of thinking that work or your career can bring any kind of peace to your soul.